Stroll through the history of Wi-Fi security protocol upgrading, you will find out the characteristics of the wireless security protocols and get to know what fits you most.
WEP stands for Wired Equivalent Privacy, and it was the first Wi-Fi security protocol approved in September 1999. It was initially expected to deliver the same security level as wired networks. A secondary function of WEP is said to prevent unauthorized access to a wireless network. However, it has been found that WEP is not as secure as desired.
WEP is used at the two lowest layers of the OSI model – the data link and physical layers it therefore does not offer end-to-end security. Nevertheless, at that time, cryptographic technology was restricted and the Wi-Fi devices were limited to 64-bit encryption. Even though the limitation was broken through and increased to 128-bit, there were also many security issues in WEP that made the keys easy to crack. Therefore, WEP, as a highly vulnerable wireless security protocol that can not bear its responsibility for protecting security, was finally replaced by WPA. In 2003, as WEP gradually performed its weakness, WPA was adopted by the Wi-Fi Alliance as an alternative for WEP. 256-bit encryption technology was introduced to WPA, which is an obvious increase compared with the 64-bit and 128-bit encryption in the WEP system. In the WPA standard, there is a diversity between the two modes: WPA-Enterprise and WPA-Personal, which use different encryption methods.